Devil's Pawn (Devil's Pawn Duet 1)

And then I get to her.

“There’s nothing here about a rape.”

“No, there isn’t but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t an attempt. I assure you my sources are infallible.” I look at her jeans. How they’re undone, shoved halfway down her hips. Or possibly pulled haphazardly up. “In my opinion the whole thing was staged to cover up the real intention which was murder.”

I look at the picture, at her face. At the strange angle of her arm, the blood on her chest. She lies on the shards of glass that were once a coffee table.

But rape?

“Christian York was the target?” I ask absently.

“No,” he says, catching me off guard. “Isabelle was.”

“Why? And how do you know this?”

Santiago reaches over to take the pages from me, flips through and sets one on top. This one is numbers. All kinds of numbers.

“Easy enough. I followed the money. I tracked it from Bishop all the way through,” he starts, tracing a group of numbers with his finger that make no sense to me but appear to be a map to him. “To where it ends up here. In Danny Gibson’s bank account. A Bishop charity was used to transfer the funds.”

“Danny Gibson?”

“The man currently serving a prison sentence for the murder of Christian York.”

I’m doing the math but I’m unprepared. Zeke suggested talking to Judge who has access to Santiago De La Rosa. If anyone could dig up what I needed, it was him, so I’d asked Judge for help with finding evidence of wrongdoing on Carlton Bishop’s part in the death of my father. I didn’t ask about this. Although I’d wondered about the break-in at the York house that killed Isabelle’s brother, I didn’t care. It didn’t matter for my purposes. Still doesn’t.

I look from Judge to Santiago to my brother, who takes the pages from me to flip through them.

“You’re saying Carlton Bishop had Christian York killed and Isabelle left for dead?”

“I’m saying she was the target. Not him.”

“Why?” Zeke asks, clearly having as hard a time as I am understanding why.

“It’s in the file.” Santiago gestures to the papers Zeke is holding. “She’s half-Bishop. They share the same father,” he says to me. “If he doesn’t produce an heir and she does, he forfeits his inheritance. He loses everything and she gets it all.”

“And he hasn’t been able to produce an heir.” None of Carlton’s wives have carried a child to full term. Faulty sperm, I’d guess. Some scum shouldn’t have the capacity to procreate. Carlton Bishop is that scum.

“Exactly,” Santiago says.

“I’m sure he could arrange for his wife to become pregnant but considering the magic of modern-day science, well, however you look at it, unless by some miracle the man produces a child within the next year, Isabelle Bishop stands to inherit the Bishop fortune,” Judge sums up.

This I know. Carlton trying to kill Isabelle though when she would have been sixteen years old? It catches me off guard.

But then again, why would it?

I came to get information on Carlton’s involvement in my father’s death but this? It may give me the ammunition I seek but it’s unsettling to say the least.

“What remains of the fortune,” Judge adds. “The land if nothing else. Unless, of course, she’s dead.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“Gibson tried to clear his name telling just that story but sadly there was no evidence to support it. Those reports weren’t easy to come by.”

“How did you come by them?”

He shrugs a shoulder. “Money always leaves a trail. A map if you know how to read it. And I’m very good at reading maps.”

“Bishop knew no one would believe Gibson if he told his story.”